40 Years of the Deutsche Bank Collection
Katharina Grosse: “Untitled”, 1992

Max Bill’s twisted granite sculpture “Continuity,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s installation "The Gates" in New York's Central Park, Cao Fei’s vision of a virtual, futuristic setting in the middle of nowhere: On a monthly basis, we show a work that represents a period of contemporary history and reflects the Deutsche Bank Collection, which is celebrating its 40th birthday this year.


Katharina Grosse
Untitled, 1992

� VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2020


Today Katharina Grosse is one of the world’s most important abstract painters. But when her work was purchased for the Deutsche Bank Collection back in the early 1990s, Grosse was still developing her formal vocabulary. With her abstract painting she entered a field dominated by men. She is inspired by the color field painting and analytical minimalism of U.S. artists such as Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt, and by the work of G�nther F�rg, the German artist who reappraised the legacy of postwar modernism, including architecture.

Her striped picture examines color and space, surface and depth; while some of the luminous, glazed colors move forward, others push into the background. At the end of the 1990s, Grosse used a spray gun to penetrate real space, spraying her abstractions onto museum walls, facades, or heaps of soil, thus creating a kind of painting that goes beyond the scope of the “frame.”